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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

This weekend, we will see the biggest event in American Sports — the Super Bowl. And although it won’t be like last year’s ‘Crypto Bowl’, there are going to be a bunch of really interesting NFT activations that I can’t wait to get into next week. Until then, a piece on Ebay’s Web3 ambitions, the metaverse and direct to fan athlete NFTs.

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This Week’s Deep Dive: eBay to Connect Fans With Athletes Using Sports NFTs

In May 2022, I wrote about ebay, and how they were ‘skating to where the puck is going’ after they announced an exclusive deal to sell Ice Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky NFTs, at the time.

Ebay have 150 million users and are one of the biggest marketplaces in the world.

In that piece, I asked, why NFTs? The answers were and are as follows:

1. To try and make money from selling digital collectibles to your 150m person audience.

2. Authenticate physical collectibles by digital means (NFTs)

We haven’t seen much of (2) from Ebay so far, but it looks like they’re trying to push hard on the natively digital front.

One of the things that I also wrote about was how important a place Ebay became for the reselling of physical collectables during the Covid pandemic.

2020 saw an incredible rise in the volume of trading cards for example.

Ebay have become a place for people to resell ‘cultural’ collectibles. Sneakers, memorabilia, trading cards, sports jerseys — all of these are regularly sold on Ebay.

But the physical market is not where they are stopping.

In May 2022, Ebay sold Wayne Gretzky NFTs in an exclusive deal.

In June 2022, Ebay acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin signalling where they see the future of their commerce business going.

And now, they are partnering with Notable Live, to leverage NFTs for fan experiences with their favourite sports stars. Notable and Ebay already have strong links, with Ebay’s capital arm, Ebay ventures, actually led Notable Live’s Series A round.

Notable Live are an ‘interactive virtual events platform’ — and they hope to facilitate exactly that for Ebay, providing sports fans with a ‘platform to connect with players’.

Here are some quotes from Mike Antonuccie, CEO of Notable Live:

“Our partnerships focus on delivering transformational solutions that provide fans true access. These solutions are built upon authentic offerings that attach memories to memorabilia and experiences directly from the source themselves,” 

Ebay Vice president of collecitbles Dawn Block said:

“Fans and collectors turn to eBay to celebrate their favorite players and teams, knowing they can find authentic, one-of-a-kind memorabilia that connects them with the history and future of sports. Our partnership with Notable Live further enhances the market-leading experiences we’ve been building for our community of sports fans, collectors and investors, enabling them to engage with living legends in a new and meaningful way.”

Athlete NFTs 

There’s a trend growing, in Web3 and out, that athletes want to take more control of their engagement with fans.

This has happened naturally since the inception of the consumer internet and has been compounded by the huge growth in social media platforms over the last decade.

There is a sense, however, that athletes want to take this further — especially from a commercial perspective.

Remember Gareth Bale and Zlatan Ibrahimovic complaining about their images being used on FIFA Ultimate Team cards, and how FIFA and EA were making money without them getting a cut?

I’ve seen a number of NFT propositions that aim to stop the bundling of sports athlete image rights from being as big of an issue when it comes to athletes getting their fair share of the deal — whether they are successful or not, is an entirely different story.

Interactive and virtual events

Virtual events have proven incredibly popular.

Concerts in Fortnite, for example, have been a hit with ‘GenZ’. But it remains to be seen whether Web3 propositions will have the same impact, in the short to medium term. Especially considering the number of people that congregate in these virtual worlds so far is dwarfed by their Web2 counterparts (not completely analogous) like Fortnite and Roblox.

I see this in ‘interactive’ distinct areas:

1. ‘Metaverse’ experiences — looking to replicate what Fortnite have done with virtual concerts in a decentralised virtual world.

2. Athlete-to-fan experiences — using NFTs and other Web3 components to gate private communities for athletes, giving fans a direct route to their favourite stars.

With (1) — we’re just not at the point where these are currently at the level consumers and sports fans desire.

The NFL partnered with Fortnite to sell $50m worth of skins in the period of a week. Those numbers are far off what we see in Web3 virtual worlds because there’s less demand. The games and virtual spaces are just not as polished or advanced as they need to be to generate comparable demand.

There’s also a huge monetization problem. Sports brands sell their rights to agencies or partner with entities to create virtual experiences, but without the demand from fans to engage in them, let alone spend money in them, it’s very difficult to envision how this progresses in the short term.

My guess is the next step for virtual worlds, ones that actually drive significant engagement and demand, are a far cry from the Decentraland & Sandbox experiences we’re currently seeing. ‘Metaverses’ need their Pokemon Go moment. 

Think VR broadcasting, for example. The notion that you could sell VR seats to an already full stadium, at a scalable level. A crude, common example used by a lot of examples — but it makes sense.

I used the word Metaverses there, but let me clarify something:

We’re seeing a hell of a lot sold in the latter of these. I’ve spoken to people for example, who have taken the rights for a mediocre athlete and a division 2 soccer team, and created their own virtual world where fans can engage with the IP from either of those properties. How many fans are they going to engage there? Probably very few, is my guess. With metaverses, we’re where we were with NFTs 5-6 years ago.

When Cryptokitties broke the Ethereum blockchain, everyone thought:“wow, dumb pictures of cats are selling for crazy amounts? That’s stupid” in the same way everyone thought that playing fruit ninja on the first ever iPhone was a stupid novelty. A decade or so on and the Blackberry no longer exists. A couple of years after Cryptokitties, their creators Dapper Labs, created NBA Top Shot.

NFTs went through a huge discovery phase, one that I think we’re still in, between Cryptokitties in 2018 to the present day.

I think the ‘metaverse’ and ‘metaverses’ are only just beginning that discovery phase now. What it looks like seven years from now, for example, is anyone’s guess.

With (2 Athlete-to-fan experiences), I really think there is a lack of product-market fit when it comes to Athlete NFTs in general, and especially when they aren’t packaged into existing ecosystems like Sorare, for example. See Mike Tyson, Wayne Rooney and others - who have done some unsuccessful NFT drops. The fan club model as well, using NFTs, has not really proven sustainable as of yet.

As someone who works in soccer said to me once:

The businesses trying to go down this route will need significant capital because the balance between giving athletes enough money to leverage their image, and running your business sustainably, is incredibly tough. Very few of these businesses, in my opinion, will work out in the long term.

Ebay on the other hand, don’t have to create scale and distribution from the ground up. They have the platform, already, and they’ve already tested the MVP with a few athlete NFT drops.

Now it’s time to see if they can scale the digital side of their business with more frequent, higher-volume NFT sales.

Then, we’ll see what their plan is to change the way fans engage with these digital items with virtual experiences.

More Sports & Crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• The NBA have extended their partnership with Meta to broadcast games in the Metaverse. 

• Web3 FC are Bringing Football to Web3 Events across the globe. 

• xG studios are dropping some commemorative NFTs for Hillto Football Club players.

• The Australian Open have admitted seven sports tech startups to their incubator.

• Borussia Dortmund have announced a partnership with FlipFam.

• Manchester City are in the news for various reasons today, but a bunch of their players were introduced as OKX (Crypto exchange) ambassadors. 

• Reddit have got something in store for the Super Bowl…no doubt a lot of what Sporting Crypto covers next week will be about the biggest event in American sports! 

• Bleacher Report have created a watch-to-earn trivia game to help change the way fans interact with broadcasts. Interested to see how this develops.

• Roblox will host a free virtual Super Bowl concert. Might seem weird to many, but virtual concerts are incredibly popular.

• Islamabad United have entered the Metaverse.

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’ that could impact you

• MakerDAO founder seeks $14m from the DAO he created for public goods. 

• Jack Butcher’s Open Edition NFT project Checks, has gone absolutely ballistic. 

• An interesting thread about the Starbucks Web3 program; Odyssey

Thank you!

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